African Universities Should Aim to Be Ivory Towers, and Proud of It

I was keen to read the two articles on Kenyan universities by Godwin Murunga and Keguro Macharia published in Kenya's dailies. As an academic, my experience confirms a little of what the two scholars are saying. I would like to add my voice to the conversation by defining what I consider the bottom line.

Let me start by saying why I returned to Kenya after 7 years abroad. But before I do so, I have to say that in the first place, it is absurd to explain a natural thing like going home. Or worse, to get home and be received not with "it's good to see you" or "Karibu nyumbani," but rather, "what are you returning to?"

My reasons for returning were simple. First, it was home. Second, I wanted a social life and to settle down (no need to read too much into that). During the 7 years I was away, I had moved house at least 4 times for a variety of reasons. And in all those moves, I often found myself in the strange position of having nowhere to stay about two weeks before the Fall semester starts. If you want to move house, your lease ends the first week of August. And usually, the new leases you will find start the last week of August because the landlords need time to clean up and repair after the last tenant has left. That means you have to look around and beg someone who is willing to host not only you, but also your property, for 2 weeks. Now that's awkward.

The other problem with nomadism is that it wrecks your social life. You leave some friends in one place, and take time to make new friends in the other. Then you have to move again and start the process of settling down both socially and geographically. I returned home because I dint want to repeat the process, and since I had friends at home, I wouldn't have to start from scratch.

By the time I was done with my studies, I had little motivation to stay in the US. My ultimate goal was to return to Kenya, and if I stayed in the US to work for a few years, as most Africans say they will, I would eventually have to pack up and move. Which means that I would move from my university first to where I would be working, then move to Kenya a few years later. I couldn't stand the prospect of packing and moving from the university where I was a student to one where I would teach, and then moving again across continents to go home.

Besides, I had heard a number of African academics say they want to return after teaching for a short time in the US. However, that short time had turned into 15 years. After getting a mortgage, a spouse and children, it isn't that easy to pack one's bags and go across one continent to another. I didn't want to find myself in the same situation.

In a nutshell, my return home had nothing to do with patriotism or trying to "make a difference" in Africa. In any case, while I was in the US I had come to passionately hate the discourse of philanthropy which seemed to gain a notch with the striking Angelina Jolie, the exhibitionist Madonna and the pretentious Bono with the despicable edition of Vogue on Africa. In my last year there, Hollywood released three dumb films that once again maligned Africa: Blood Diamonds, The Last King of Scotland, and The Constant Gardener. My distaste for philanthropy made me realize that the African bourgeoisie, including academics, are sometimes not much different from the messianic Westerners. The only difference is that because we are African, we claim some kind of right to "change" our home countries. Personally, I find that thinking problematic because it suggests that change must necessarily come from the West, even if the agent is African. And years of mismanagement, corruption and downright mediocrity from Western-educated African politicians had left me with no illusion that I would have any positive impact on my society.

I therefore decided that if Africa expects something from me, I must expect something from Africa; otherwise Africa will misuse me like it does so many others and be content in mediocrity. So far, the contract has worked for me. I have been able to reconnect with friends and family as well as form new friends. I have been able to interact with colleagues from other universities - which I very much enjoy. I have met Kenyans and Africans who are working hard to entrench a culture of confidence and efficiency. I have found teaching exciting because even though the university is rigid and resistant to change, the students welcome it and accept new ways of doing things.

On the other hand, I have found out that many of us do little and expect much from the government or someone else but us. We excuse mediocrity in the name of African traditions, and frown on the pursuit of knowledge unless it is rewarded by certificates or jobs. I refuse to accept that this is African culture, as some people say in order to laugh away their incompetence or their reluctance to serve others.

I expect that much because I think the mentality of demeaning the pursuit of knowledge that Macharia describes is a result of our internalization of racism. We have come to believe that thinking, innovation and good standards are Western, and that instinct, communitarianism and mediocrity are to be negotiated in the African friendliness and socialism we love to boast about, more so if the people involved are from the same tribe. I refuse to accept this situation. I demand good standards from Africans because I think we are human beings like everyone else. I demand that African socialism, if it exists, should not be restricted to the personal but reflected at the social level as well. For if we are as caring about one another, how come politicians do not care enough to plan ahead so that 10 million Kenyans would not face starvation? How can we be "African" if we deny children access to vaccines and medicines because we are lining our pockets? Why doesn't our socialism extend beyond sending money to relatives at home to building institutions so that relatives will be able to earn a living and not need handouts in the first place?

For these reasons, Godwin Murunga's response to Macharia's article seems to me a little fatalistic. He seems to accept the gist of what Macharia says, but offers experience as the exception to the rule that offer hope. But Macharia's article reveals the experience of many academics. When I returned, the departments I visited were not very welcoming. I was told in one university that there was no position for someone like me because no one else was in my field (variety, anyone?), but when I had the fortune of meeting an administrator a few months later, he said that that that was not the case. In another university, the head asked me to send my undergraduate transcripts - which I considered to be a way of humiliating me - and told me that the students would not be interested in the new courses I proposed to offer. In another, the American head was plain patronizing and frowned on my research activities after giving me a lecture on morality which, he said, was lacking in Kenyan lecturers. When I thought of applying to other universities, I was informed that many of the departments have turned into tribal - and now more absurdly, clan - bases. And since this was at the height of the electoral chaos and tribal animosity, I knew there was little hope.

Since then, I have also found out that in many universities, many of the non-academic staff, from librarians to registrars to accountants, seem not to understand that the core business of the university is knowledge production, and so they treat academics with contempt. Payments for teaching courses are delayed if one does not know how to beg the finance office. Books take forever to be purchased and put on the shelves. As Macharia says, the libraries close their doors to non-members of the University. For public universities, this is a scandal, since they are funded by tax payers, and so those tax payers should be allowed to use the libraries. And why the libraries don't simply register non-university users at a fee baffles me. And then the very same academic administrators who can change these policies and practices complain that Kenyans don't read. But how can they, when the facilities are closed to them?

In the meantime, we are expected to glamorize our old courses to attract more students. If I want to teach, say a new course on my hero Frantz Fanon next semester, I have to draw up a proposal and present it to the department, revise it and send it to the faculty, then revise it and send it to the Senate. And if I am lucky, I may not have to send it to the government's Commission for Higher Education. That is a whole semester gone during which the students could have been reading the latest research. And by the time the necessary books are ordered ... well, let's safely say it would take a whole year to start the course. All this costly protocol has been explained to me as necessary to prevent lecturers from teaching sub-standard courses. I am not convinced, because even with all this policing of lecturers as if they are children, lecturers who are determined still teach a whole semester's work in two weeks to participating students who want to get over and done with it so that they can get their certificates.

But that doesn't seem to bother university administrators - and even students - very much. Administrators want numbers, which means money, students want certificates. In between, the lecturer has to convince students to stay till the end of class and to do homework. In such circumstances, it is understandable if lecturers can only resign themselves to, as Macharia says, teaching students for the certificates.

On the other hand, Macharia's article is a little patronizing and does not deal with the bottom line. For me, the problem has not been the lack of access to materials, because one can and should work with whatever is available. Moreover, as Murunga says, there is vibrant research in Kenya if one is keen to find it. Bookshops are now stocking more academic and other books, and so browsing is an adventure. Some universities already have access to journals online, so Macharia needed to befriend a lecturer and to use his or her office to download the material. Of course I find this option pathetic, but until the universities cultivate a culture in which we don't have to negotiate with staff - which usually means staff from the same tribe - that is his best option. Besides, shouldn't coming to a country for academic research not also serve as an opportunity exchange ideas and visits with the local faculty? Kenyan-based lecturers also have something to give the world.

The bottom line is not that Kenyan universities do not meet American standards or that we have to look for the good side of Kenyan universities. The bottom line is that many Kenyans do not believe in knowledge production that is not utilitarian. Outside the university, education is for getting jobs. Within the university, we have constantly to answer the question of how our studies relate to the man on the street or the man in the rural areas. Yet a Westerner who is doing a linguistic study of Chaucer or the love letters of some obscure French medieval fellow never has to ask or answer that question.

And the West is partly to blame for this disparity. At most lectures or conference papers I have given in the United States, most of the questions, however sophisticatedly framed, boil down to the question "What can we do (for Africa)?" Even we African academics feel that it is our duty to extol democracy and fight for civic liberties, even when these issues are not exactly relevant.

Yet the primary role of universities should not be to disseminate knowledge to the man on the street. The pyramids in Egypt were not designed by an architect spending time with peasants. It was designed by people who sat down to calculate what would be needed. A medical researcher cannot find a cure to a disease if he or she also has to spend time looking for manufacturers and distributing the medicines to the "ordinary mwananchi." That expectation is absurd. That is why America has think tanks, and why pre-colonial African empires sponsored artists and researchers, as is the case with the griots and the scholars in places like Timbuktu.

Yes, we academics are supposed to live in an ivory tower. The primary responsibility of implementing and giving life to ideas produced in universities belongs to political leaders and government. Interacting with the famous peasants or the "market" and "industry" should be organic to the research, not done for the simple sake of being "relevant." The primary task of revising the curriculum regularly to disseminate new knowledge at local levels does not reside with lecturers, but with the ministry of education. The ministries in charge of industry, health and science should be making the latest technologies and medicines available to citizens. And some ministry should be aiming to build libraries in every Kenyan town. And the ministry of culture should be ensuring that museums and archives are well managed and easy to consult. And the ministry of tourism should include academic research as part of its attractions, as France has done. France earns a lot of money during the summer from American academics who pay special visa fees and rent houses in different French towns in order to consult the Bibliotheque Nationale and local archives. The country also earns money from American students seeking to polish their language skills. At one point, the 5^th largest foreign exchange earner in the United States was university education.

However, politicians in Kenya, some with PhD's and professorships, have no vision. Worse, they talk like fools in public, and ultimately insult the intelligence of Kenyans. Yet, as Fanon says in The Wretched of the Earth, it is possible to explain even the most complex of issues to the ordinary person if one is really keen to do so. And without intelligent public discourse, particularly from the educated, it is absurd to expect Kenyans to value intellectual discipline and knowledge.

The source of this behavior, as Albert Memmi says in The Colonizer and the Colonized, was good-for-nothing Europeans who settled in Africa because they could not succeed financially or professionally in Europe, and they promptly extended their mediocrity here. The situation has not changed that much - as a glance at the qualification of ambassadors and "development experts" to Africa reveals. I mean, how does Bono - a musician - decide he has the capacity to comment on grave socio-political issues in our continent? Would the West accept the same if Kofi Olomide did the same for the France? In fact, wouldn't it be nice if Oliver Mtukudzi went to Robert Mugabe to plead on behalf of the poor in Britain?

One of the most absurd examples of how the West still actively encourages mediocrity on our continent is former president Jacques Chirac's visit to Congo-Brazzaville a few years ago. Chirac was invited by president Sassou-Ngueso to lay the foundation stone for the mausoleum where the bones of colonial explorer Savorgnan de Brazza, which were being being transported from Algeria, would be interred after he was baptized as a "humanist." These days, Western donors fund "development" projects at the grassroots but not research in the university that would ultimately be useful in those projects. It goes without saying that the solutions they impose are often irrelevant, if not damaging.

However, we must still assume some responsibility for the limited value for knowledge production and dissemination in Kenya, and maybe in the rest of Africa. Our frowning on knowledge is not our culture; it is a choice we have made. The standards in Kenyan universities are simply a symptom of this choice. And declaring our loyalty and love for our countries and institutions without demanding better standards does not encourage us to aspire for more but comforts us to be content with less.

If we believe that we Africans are human beings, we must demand and expect of ourselves high standards of living, thinking and action. Now that, is a choice we can make.